The couple never forgot how lucky they were, or as Fidden put it, “how difficult it must be for someone who is single and who also has this understanding and awareness and these truths.” Where would such a person find love, especially given that they are even more ostracized from society than Aine and him? Then it hit him: “Wow, what a fantastic business idea! Let’s go and do it! So that’s what we did.”
Longreads investigates the loves lives of Truthers, with a little help from Rob Brotherton, conspiracy theorist theorist. Another take from Vice is a little less sympathetic. [more inside]
posted by Kitty Stardust
on Nov 30, 2016 -
37 comments

It runs (in the northern hemisphere) from November to March, though culturally it kicks off when Starbucks change their menu to pumpkin spice; people who would rather be single or promiscuous start looking for someone to attach themselves to for the cold winter months. How to handle ‘Cuffing Season’
posted by acb
on Oct 15, 2016 -
74 comments

The Emails of Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer by Jonathan Safran Foer [The New York Times] For over a decade, the Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman and the author Jonathan Safran Foer have amassed countless email exchanges about family, creativity and angry koalas — until earlier this year, when their epistolary archive mysteriously disappeared. On the eve of her ambitious directorial debut, the old friends start anew, reconnecting online to reflect on how the times have changed, and how they have changed over time.
posted by Fizz
on Jul 14, 2016 -
83 comments

[A] hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.
Alain de Botton explains why you will marry the wrong person.
posted by gottabefunky
on Jun 5, 2016 -
59 comments

The Five Love Languages is a bestselling book that discusses the five essential ways that people “speak and understand emotional love.” The primary love languages include Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch, but many readers are unaware of the remaining seventeen categories, which include the following....
posted by sciatrix
on Apr 28, 2016 -
26 comments

Female friendship was not a consolation prize, some romance also-ran. Women who find affinity with one another are not settling. In fact, they may be doing the opposite, finding something vital that is lacking in their romantic entanglements, and thus setting their standards healthily higher. (SLNYT)
posted by quiet coyote
on Feb 28, 2016 -
24 comments

Selfies, Dating, and the American 14-Year-Old. "As crushes go from real-life likes to digital “likes,” the typical American teenage girl is confronted with a set of social anxieties never before seen in human history. Nancy Jo Sales observes one 14-year-old as she gets ready to embark on her first I.R.L. date."
posted by zarq
on Feb 26, 2016 -
53 comments

You see them everywhere—exhausted young women pouring all their spare energy into organising, encouraging and taking care of young men who resent them for doing it but resent them even harder when they don’t. You see them cringing for every crumb of affection before someone cracks and it all goes wrong and the grim cycle starts again. You can fritter away the whole of your youth that way. I know women who have. - Laurie Penny, Maybe you should just be single [SL NewStatesman]
posted by melissasaurus
on Feb 14, 2016 -
255 comments

"[E]ver since noticing a beautifully wrinkled and mysteriously sensual older French woman at a friend’s party, and, having inquired if she was the wife of the frizzy-haired, balding older man with the huge, horn-rimmed glasses next to her, and being informed that, “Nooo, she’s his mistress. They’ve been lovers for many years,” I’d decided that loverhood was what I aspired to." "The Magic Trick," by Carolita Johnson. (SLTheHairpin) [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes
on Feb 11, 2016 -
12 comments

The Tail End: "No matter what your age, you may, without realizing it, be enjoying the very last chapter of some of the relationships that matter most to you." (via)[more inside]
posted by flex
on Dec 13, 2015 -
35 comments

The Last Message Received. This is a Tumblr chronicling people's final communications with one another, for reasons mundane, mysterious, dramatic or tragic. It may make you a bit misty.
posted by zeusianfog
on Dec 6, 2015 -
45 comments

By analysing the language of popular magazines, TV shows and self-help books and by conducting interviews with men and women in different countries, scholars including Eva Illouz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have demonstrated clearly that our ideas about love are dominated by powerful political, economic and social forces. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we can call romantic regimes: systems of emotional conduct that affect how we speak about how we feel, determine 'normal' behaviours, and establish who is eligible for love – and who is not.
posted by divined by radio
on Oct 28, 2015 -
23 comments

National Magazine Award Finalist Katy Butler describes a heartfelt experience attending the Art and Science of Love, a Gottman workshop, with her "almost husband". "I remember the cautionary words of Wendell Berry in an essay on marriage...'Some wishes cannot succeed. . . . Because the condition of marriage is worldly and it's meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. . . . When you unite yourself with another, you unite yourselves with the unknown.'" John Gottman's well-known research on successful marriages.
posted by storybored
on Oct 3, 2015 -
20 comments

"The Disgustings" (12:12 ) is a short film starring Drew Droege and written, directed and starring Jordan Firstman. It's about two gay men living in Los Angeles who just happen to be completely, utterly awful. The Disgustings return in "Save The Date." (5:45)
posted by The Whelk
on Sep 22, 2015 -
14 comments

Every relationship brings with it a private language built on shared memories and experiences. Maybe it's a joke shared on a date, maybe a saying or misspoken phrase that privately comes to represent so much more. Following the death of her husband, publicist/copywriter and blogger Virge Randall writes about life after losing the shared language of love.
posted by garius
on Sep 16, 2015 -
56 comments

"I call it the Dating Apocalypse,” says a woman in New York, aged 29.“Guys view everything as a competition,” [Alex] elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”
posted by modernnomad
on Aug 9, 2015 -
148 comments

"Historically, spinsterhood has meant a kind of radical unavailability to straight men, implying either rejection of them or rejection by them or both. This sought or unsought rejection has the potential to be experienced by women as a source of strength. It can mean making the choice not just to set your own terms on the marriage or meat market, but to opt out of the market altogether." [Briallen Hopper for LA Review of Books: On Spinsters.] [more inside]
posted by divined by radio
on Jul 15, 2015 -
8 comments

"I like my music polyphonic. If you think I meant anything else, you know what I meant." So Lord Peter Wimsey tells Harriet Vane in Dorothy L Sayers's classic novel, Gaudy Night, this year celebrating its 80th birthday. But as Mo Moulton writes in her essay with personal interruptions on The Toast, "Of course he did mean something else, and not only Harriet but the reader understands exactly what: that his ideal relationship, like his ideal music, is produced by the combination of equals rather than the hierarchy of melody and harmony, or man and wife." [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel
on May 20, 2015 -
17 comments

If I had still been at my heaviest weight, I never would have approached Brian. As a fat woman, I have been taught that there is an order of operations for love: First, you get thin; then, you can date who you want. Until you do the first thing, the second thing is impossible. So for many women who struggle with their weight, it becomes a fight not just for their health or well-being, but a struggle to just be worthy of the love so many people take for granted.

The perception that online relationships are somehow less real than their physical counterparts exemplifies what Nathan Jurgenson, a New York-based sociologist and researcher for the messaging platform Snapchat, calls "digital dualism." Contemporary identities and relationships are no more or less authentic in either space. "We're coming to terms with there being just one reality and digital is part of it, not any less real or true," Jurgenson said. "What you do online and what you do face-to-face are completely interwoven."

"I love you" – WHAT A LIE! LIES, DAMN LIES! Yes, it's like that when you are young, naïve and in love. And you don't realize your boyfriend started dating you just because he wanted to take you to bed! I got this teddy bear for Valentine's. He survived on top of my closet in a plastic bag, because it wasn’t him who hurt me, but the idiot who left him behind.

"Fuck Yes!" or No - "Think about this for a moment: Why would you ever choose to be with someone who is not excited to be with you?"
(Fuck Yes, No Less - "How many of us have been taught to let persuasion and doubt override our instincts? How many of us have been taught to live in the grey?") [more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 9, 2014 -
58 comments

We were each other’s firsts. I was 16, a stressed-out immigrant kid, she was the daughter of Colombian Catholics who were quite fond of the church’s policy on pre-marital sex. So it took us quite a while to awkwardly, semi-defeatedly concede to each other that we had run out of excuses to avoid sex. “This weekend?” I said grimly. A very sweet Guardian piece called "My parents helped me to lose my virginity" by novelist Boris Fishman.
posted by jbickers
on Sep 12, 2014 -
12 comments

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